The Dinner
Before meeting the Wells sisters for dinner, Mishka faked being a shipwrecked sailor and was collected on the Moreau's Island beach by Mina, the warforged maid of the manor. She took him to Harriet Wells and informed the elder lady of the house who he was, apparently having truesight that looked right through Mishka's disguise. Harriet seemed to find this interesting, and she gave Mishka a tour of the house as they chatted about his life as a pirate and her life on the island. She revealed that she knew the Runners were indeed shipwrecked, and he successfully deflected the earlier lie with talk about privacy and paranoia, which she seemed to find acceptable. He asked her about the creatures, and she reiterated her early comment about believing the islands to be cursed or something. He passively read her thoughts as he mentioned the sea beast, and saw very similar flashes in her mind as he saw in the twisted twins and scarred man creatures from before -- a dark room, bright flashes of light, some sort of laboratory, fleshy creatures in pain. He saw a smaller sea creature being twisted together, as if some sort of prototype for the sea beast that destroyed the Albatross. Mishka is now sure that Harriet, if not also Georgina, made the sea beast. When the Runners came back to the manor for dinner -- leaving Hansel, Ensign, and Luci behind with the creatures -- they were served a pleasant meal and made some nice smalltalk. Rexaria caused a scene on the table, which Georgina seemed to find very charming, and Harriet seemed pleased that her younger sister was happy. Goro then excused himself to 'find a bathroom'. In reality, he snooped around relentlessly, and in the manor's main hallway, he heard a scratching sound coming from the wall. It seemed to follow him as he moved, so he cast a scrying spell that allowed him to see on the other side of the wall. What he saw was a cramped, unlit passage, and inside it, a middle-aged half-elf man who looked deformed and half-rotten, but moved and behaved not like one of the monsters they'd encountered, but as a person of sound mind. When Goro knocked on the wall, he knocked back. Unfortunately, that was when Mina noticed Goro acting strangely, and came to talk to him. He spun a story about how he could have sworn there was a bathroom here, and she directed him to an actual bathroom, then back to the dining hall. About that time, Larkin stepped outside for an alleged smoke, but instead went scouting around the house, checking the other entrances. She slipped in the back door and evaded being spotted by Mina, jimmying a lock and getting into one of the sisters' rooms, where she found assorted arcane tomes and paper, the sort she recognized her wizard pal Finch having. Breaking into an adjoining room, however, she found a bloody mess of an arcane workspace, with a couple of grates that drained into the dark sewers below. She said "fuck that" to dropping down, but did steal a pair of red fingerless gloves that had a whiff of magic off the desk. On the way out, she heard scratching on the hallway wall as well, and a splashing sound coming from the nearby bathhouse, but hurried back to dinner since she'd been gone a while. While she was away, Harriet commented that the area could be dangerous, and suggested that perhaps someone should check on her, which Raef did, ostensibly -- actually looking for his own way back in. He came back and convincingly lied that she was fine. When she did return, she stammered a bit, and Goro covered for her by bringing up the man in the walls. Harriet got up to go deal with the problem. She strongly discouraged Goro from coming along, but he insisted upon showing her where he heard the sounds and saw the 'intruder'. He wanted to accompany her deeper into the manor, but she put her foot down, reminding him that he's a stranger, she's a private person, and she's perfectly capable of dealing with things on her own. He hung around outside the door and tried to chat up Mina, but she wasn't into it. In the dining room, Mishka -- suspecting that Harriet may be the evil one and Georgina may be innocent -- floated this idea at the younger sister, who seemed distressed by the idea that her older sister, who had taken care of her in the fifteen years since their parents' deaths, and managed the Wells' estate by herself, was in the wrong. Georgina appears to be on the same page as her sister. Specifically, when Mishka mentioned Harriet making the sea beast and other abominations, Larkin picked up on particular discomfort from Georgina. Harriet returned, telling Goro that everything was fine and he was probably seeing things. He was deeply consternated by this and refused to come back to dinner, so a weary Harriet asked his friends to handle him. Larkin agreed and popped out to the hallway to wrangle her cranky Odd Person cousin, but instead, of course, joined him in breaking into the room Harriet had recently come from. The Basha-Voronin cousins scouted out this part of the manor, finding the other sister's room, some unused servant's quarters, Renfield's room, and indeed, a bathroom. They didn't find a way into the passageway Goro had seen the decaying man in, so he decided to dimension door over after agreeing on a communication system of knock patterns to report back to Larkin. The dark hallway ran alongside the main hall, and at the northern end, he found a trapdoor leading down. When Goro hopped down into the sewers, he found water running red with blood and assorted monstrosities roaming around, including vicious, carnivorous, large worms which attacked and devoured some other creatures. He conveyed this horrifying shit to Larkin via the two-way mirror, then got the fuck out. Meanwhile, Larkin had investigated a staircase that led down, into a sort of root cellar or storage room. In it, she spotted the man from the walls, and also got the fuck out, though when Goro rejoined her, he immediately charged in to speak to the man. He introduced himself as Fritz, and told them that he was once the butler and groundskeeper for the Taylor Wells and Reina Wells nee Moreau. He's been on the island for a long time, and saw Harriet and Georgina grow up. While he didn't have much information to offer about the sisters or their parents, only knowing that the Mistress and Master of the house died in the middle of the night, seemingly in some sort of explosion, he did have juicy info about Renfield. Fritz told Goro and Larkin that he was once the trainer of the island's blinkdogs, but after the elder Wellses died, the sisters began experimenting on the dogs, making them more more dangerous and aggressive guard dogs. The second step of their plan involved taking the biggest and meanest of the dogs and transforming it into a man -- Renfield. Renfield now runs the pack, but Fritz knows that he commands them with fear and brute force, and believes that he could turn the dogs against their misbegotten alpha. However, he's afraid of doing this in such a way where the sisters could know he did it. After all, their experimentation on him is why his appearance is the way it is -- he's been twisted and killed and brought back on multiple occasions, and is convinced that a cleric can't help him. He feels great sympathy for Harriet and Georgina, thinking of them as poor girls who have been through hard times and come out damaged, and he doesn't want them to be hurt -- he's just afraid of how powerful they are. Fritz also told the murderbros that he isn't sure where Mina, the warforged maid, came from. Neither of the sisters have any means of creating her, as that generally takes an artificer and/or smith, and her appearance didn't correlate with the arrival of a ship. He tries to keep away from her, finding her creepy. Additionally, he confirmed that the Veiled Shade and the zombie by the lighthouse are, to the best of his knowledge, what remains of Reina and Taylor Wells after a much-younger Georgina attempted to resurrect them. Around this time, dinner was wrapping up, so Larkin and Goro crept on out and met back up with Raef and Mishka as they left the estate and went back to the southern island to debrief with Hansel, Ensign, and Luci. They had made it through dinner unscarred. Category:Session Recaps